Chapter 2: The origins of faux news
In a windowless conference room at Trump Tower, on January 6, 2017, Comey briefed the president-elect in regards to the dossier about him and Russia. Trump had heard, from aides, media “rumblings” about Russia, but, in an interview, he said he was unaware of the dossier until he met with Comey.
Comey’s one-on-one with Trump got here after the intelligence community briefed him on a latest “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) on Russian activities in 2016. The ICA claimed that Russia had mounted an “influence campaign” aimed toward the election but had not targeted or compromised vote-tallying systems. Its most vital, and controversial, finding was that “Putin and the Russian government developed a transparent preference for President-elect Trump,” versus Russia’s usual goal, which was generally sowing chaos in the US. An unclassified version of the ICA was released the identical day in Washington. The dossier, actually a series of reports in 2016, was included within the assessment, nevertheless it remained secret, temporarily, because a summary of it was attached as a classified appendix.
“The one thing that basically resonated,” Trump said in regards to the briefing, “was when he said 4 hookers,” a reference to the unsubstantiated claim of a salacious encounter in Moscow. Trump’s immediate response was that “this just isn’t going to be good for the family,” he recalled. But his wife, Melania, “didn’t imagine it in any respect,” telling him, “That’s not your cope with the golden shower,” Trump recalled.
Trump’s marriage may need survived but his hoped for honeymoon with the press was about to finish. The dossier, largely suppressed by the media in 2016, was about to surface.
But first got here the ICA. It received massive, and largely uncritical coverage.
Another reporters weren’t convinced. Gessen called the ICA “flawed” since it was based on “conjecture” and incorporated “misreported or mistranslated” and “false” public statements. They criticized the key media, including the Latest York Times, for describing the ICA as a “strong statement.”
In an interview, Gessen said that their skepticism left them isolated and so they began to “lose confidence.”
The dossier wound up within the ICA since the FBI pushed it, despite reservations on the CIA. Agency analysts saw it as an “web rumor,” based on Justice Department documents. Two “senior managers within the CIA mission center liable for Russia” also had reservations, based on a memoir by Brennan, the pinnacle of the agency on the time. Brennan testified that it didn’t inform the report’s evaluation or judgments, though Adm. Mike Rogers, the pinnacle of the NSA, told the House Intelligence Committee it was “a part of the general ICA review/approval process.” Whatever its significance, the proven fact that top government officials were using the dossier in an official report and a presidential briefing was the news hook the media needed.
On Sunday, January 8, McCabe, the FBI’s deputy director, sent a memo to the bureau’s leadership headlined “the flood is coming.” He noted that CNN was “near” publishing a bit in regards to the dossier, with the “trigger” being Comey’s transient and the dossier’s attachment to the ICA.
The dam broke two days later when CNN disclosed the Comey briefing. Hours later, BuzzFeed News posted the complete dossier, with a warning that the fabric was “unverified and potentially unverifiable.” Each outlets cited the federal government use of the dossier to justify their going ahead.
It was a twist to the symbiotic relationship between the media and the national-security apparatus; often, reporters use pending government motion as a peg for his or her stories. On this case the federal government cited the media for its actions. Comey, in his 2018 book A Higher Loyalty, wrote that CNN had “informed the FBI press office they were going to run with it as soon as the subsequent day,” so “I could see no way out of” telling Trump. Comey also cited CNN’s imminent disclosure in a subsequent explanation to Trump, based on Comey’s notes.
Ben Smith, then the editor of BuzzFeed News, said in an interview the choice was a “journalistic no-brainer,” especially since BuzzFeed was a “barely fringy place.” A BuzzFeed reporter, Ken Bensinger, got access to the dossier via David Kramer, an in depth associate of then-senator John McCain. He photographed the pages when Kramer was out of the room, based on Kramer’s testimony in a libel suit. Kramer also testified he wouldn’t have granted “access” to Bensinger if he knew “BuzzFeed would publish.” (Kramer declined to comment after I sent him an email explaining what this text would say about him.)
Bensinger had been vetting the dossier, but was on vacation at Disney World along with his family when CNN aired its story. A BuzzFeed editor called him to say the publication planned to publish the whole document, a possibility that had not previously been discussed, Bensinger said in an interview. A couple of minutes later, in a call with Smith and other editors, Bensinger voiced his opposition to publishing the raw material but was told the choice had already been made. Smith declined to debate Bensinger’s role, suggesting I ask him directly. (Bensinger joined the Latest York Times in August; Smith left last January, after two years as a media columnist, to co-found a latest global media outlet, Semafor.)
Though many within the media later criticized Smith’s decision—some even called it “fake news”— Smith held his ground in our conversation. He said some publications had “problematic” and “secret” relationships with the dossier’s sponsor or creator that prevented them from revealing the knowledge. (CJR defended BuzzFeed’s decision on the time, but in 2021, with the dossier’s credibility crumbling, Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor, said that was a mistake.)
Wolf Blitzer, a CNN host, said shortly after the story broke that “CNN wouldn’t have done a story in regards to the dossier’s existence” if officials “hadn’t told Trump about it.” CNN, in its story, also said the sources utilized by the creator of the report, described as a former British intelligence agent, soon to be outed as Steele, had been “checked out” over the past few months and located to be “credible enough.”
It seems that just a few weeks after the FBI began trying out the dossier, in the autumn of 2016, it offered Steele as much as $1 million if he could offer corroboration and he didn’t, based on court testimony by an FBI official in October.
Steele, in response to my questions earlier this 12 months, wrote that his “raw intelligence reports” were meant only “for client oral briefing, reasonably than a finished and assessed written intelligence product,” which might have contained “sourcing caveats.” Thus, Steele wrote, “the standard of the Dossier reports was high quality imo.” He said just one minor detail had been “disproved,” with the remaining either corroborated or unverified.
In response to follow-up questions, he provided additional corroborative information, nevertheless it was mostly off the record. In a lengthy 2017 interview with the FBI, Steele attributed a big majority of the dossier to his “primary sub-source,” based on the FBI report. But, in response to my questions, he declined to debate the work of his important source, Igor Danchenko, a Russian living within the US. CNN’s story claimed “his [Steele’s] investigations related to Mr. Trump were initially funded by groups and donors supporting Republican opponents of Mr. Trump throughout the GOP primaries.” However the sponsors of the dossier, writing in a book in 2019, made clear the dossier got here later, as a separate project, and the research trove commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans was never shared with Steele. Steele confirmed that in his response to my questions. (Other news outlets made the identical mistake—and CNN repeated it in August 2018—though when the Associated Press got it mistaken in February 2018 the news agency ran a correction the subsequent day. CNN, in a deep dive into the dossier in November 2021, accurately described the dossier sponsors. The 2017 CNN story later won the Merriman Smith Award from the White House Correspondents’ Association; the citation noted how the network story made the dossier “a part of the lexicon.”)
Nevertheless it could be the fallout from the dossier, even greater than the document itself, that might be probably the most enduring legacy for Trump. At a news conference the subsequent day, Trump said “I believe it was Russia” that was behind the hacking and Putin “mustn’t be doing it. He won’t be doing it. Russia can have greater respect for our country.” After Trump trashed CNN for its report, the network’s correspondent Jim Acosta interrupted Mara Liasson of NPR to ask a matter as a part of a response to Trump’s comments. Trump declined, saying “you might be fake news,” the primary time he had publicly labeled a person journalist using those words. Trump would go on to make the words an indicator of his presidency—about once a day in his first 12 months alone—and the phrase became Collier’s Dictionary’s Word of the Yr for 2017.
Jonathan Karl, the ABC White House correspondent, in his 2020 book Front Row on the Trump Show, wrote that “Acosta was, in reality, rudely interrupting Mara Liasson,” and most reporters saw it that way. More broadly, Karl said the media coverage of Trump was “relentlessly and exhaustively negative,” reasonably than “striving for fairness and objectivity,” and did “as much to undermine the credibility of the free press because the president’s taunts.” A 12 months later, Karl wrote one other Trump book, Betrayal, that called out the previous president’s “lying” and “incompetence,” culminating in “the betrayal of democracy at the top.” He acknowledged his criticism could make him “sound like a member of the opposition party,” however the ABC correspondent was okay with that: “so be it,” he added.
It didn’t take long for Steele’s name to change into public because the creator of the dossier. Bradley Hope, then on the Wall Street Journal, said in an interview that he discovered Steele’s name after talking to 2 people within the private intelligence world. They quickly told him the BuzzFeed-published reports contained clues indicating they were Steele’s, including the “exact style” and “the shoddiness of it.” Other sources, he said, “verified” Steele’s role.
Steele, in his response to me, accused one among the Journal coauthors, Alan Cullison, of a “breach of confidence” with Kramer, the McCain confidant who provided the dossier to BuzzFeed. Steele went on to also attack Hope for what “looks like a post-hoc cover story,” adding, in a subsequent reply, that his explanation “seems implausible” based on the formatting his company uses. Finally, Steele linked the story to a “politically partisan line taken against me” and others “by the WSJ to learn Trump and the Republicans.”
Hope, in an email, called Steele’s claim “100% false,” adding that Steele’s “conspiracy speculation” leads Hope “to doubt the entire analytical framework” Steele “uses to view the world.” Cullison, in an email, said “Kramer didn’t tell me” Steele’s identity and “the story of Steele’s identity was born of Bradley’s work.” Kramer declined to comment after I disclosed all sides of the dispute to him.
The Times quickly weighed in after the Journal disclosure, first with an explainer that said it might not name the “research firm and the previous British spy due to a confidential source agreement with The Latest York Times.” Yet hours later, the paper did just that, publishing one other story that identified Fusion because the firm that hired Steele. (The net version of the explainer was later altered to discover the parties however the newspaper never disclosed the change to readers.)
The WSJ and the Times stories weren’t well received by Fusion. At first, they feared for Steele’s safety. Then they felt the Times’ behavior was “improper,” since it had “unilaterally” published material “it had learned off the record,” the founders wrote of their book.
Hours after the Times story ran, the Post upped the temperature on Russia much more. Columnist David Ignatius disclosed that incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn had phoned Russia’s US ambassador “several times” at the top of the 12 months, based on “a senior US government official.” Ignatius noted the talks had come on the day the Obama administration had expelled Russian diplomats in retaliation for the country’s hacking activities, so he questioned whether Flynn had “violated” the spirit of an “unenforced” law barring US residents from attempting to resolve “disputes.”
Ignatius went on to jot down that it may be a “good thing” if Trump’s team was attempting to de-escalate the situation. But Ignatius didn’t know the substance of the conversations. Hours before his story went online, Ignatius appeared on MSNBC and, while not disclosing his upcoming Flynn exclusive, said “it was hard to argue” against the necessity to “improve relations with Russia.”
The existence of Flynn’s talks with the ambassador was known by Adam Entous, a reporter then on the Post, but he held off writing anything since the mere fact of a contact wasn’t enough to justify a story. “It might have been something innocent,” Entous, now with the Times, said in an interview, “something he could be praised for.”
On the heels of the Ignatius column, the FBI’s “investigative tempo increased,” based on FBI records, and the Senate intelligence panel announced an inquiry into Russia’s election activities. (The House Intelligence Committee announced an analogous effort later that month.)
Two days after the Senate announcement, Bob Woodward, appearing on Fox News, called the dossier a “garbage document” that “never must have” been a part of an intelligence briefing. He later told me that the Post wasn’t fascinated about his harsh criticism of the dossier. After his remarks on Fox, Woodward said he “reached out to individuals who covered this” on the paper, identifying them only generically as “reporters,” to clarify why he was so critical. Asked how they reacted, Woodward said: “To be honest, there was an absence of curiosity on the a part of the people on the Post about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that and I didn’t force it on anyone.”
Trump on the time tweeted a “thanks” to Woodward and asked the media to “apologize.” That, in fact, never happened. Trump’s relationship with the media, by then, had reached “the purpose of no return,” based on a former aide.
As Trump prepared to take office, the potential for one other Watergate was on the mind of some reporters, several journalists told me, intensifying the competition. “There was a feeding frenzy to try to be first with the story,” Entous explained to me.
The day before Trump’s inauguration, the Times featured a story: “Intercepted Russian Communications A part of Inquiry into Trump Associates.” The piece, once posted, evoked a robust response from Strzok, who was leading the FBI inquiry: “no substance and largely mistaken,” he texted, adding “the press goes to undermine its credibility.”
Hours later, Liz Spayd, the Times’ public editor, posted a column criticizing the October 31 piece, which reported that the FBI had found no clear link between Trump and Russia. Spayd wrote that the story “downplayed its significance” and disclosed that the FBI had asked the paper to delay publication. Spayd also contrasted the paper’s “relentless” coverage of the Clinton email matter with its “timid” pursuit of the Russia investigation in 2016. Baquet defended his handling of the story to Spayd.
After the column got here out, Baquet quickly emailed several colleagues, saying Spayd’s piece was “really bad,” mainly for its disclosure of confidential information regarding deliberations about whether to publish the Alfa Bank matter. One 12 months later, Baquet told the Post’s Wemple that “we might have solid that [October] story otherwise nevertheless it was never meant to present the Trump campaign a clean bill of health.”
Spayd, in an email to me, complained that the Times had “two standards.” Before the election, she wrote, the October 31 piece was “downplayed” since the paper “didn’t know whether the allegations held up,” but after the election, “the Times produced a gradual stream of stories about whether Trump conspired with Russians to win the election without knowing whether the allegation was actually true.”
Trump told me he noticed the difference in coverage once he took office. Not only did he must run the country, he needed to fight off “unbelievably fake” stories. Spayd, a former editor of CJR, left the Times just a few months after the column was published, and the position of public editor was ultimately abolished.
At the same time as those debates were unfolding within the Times newsroom, the paper was about to land what it thought was its bombshell. The paper was so sure of itself that it let a filmmaker capture internal deliberations, which wound up airing in a 2018 series on Showtime called The Fourth Estate.
Because the story is being edited, Mark Mazzetti, an investigative reporter within the Washington bureau who was also helping edit a number of the Trump-Russia coverage, is shown telling senior editors he’s “fairly sure members of Russian intelligence” were “having conversations with members of Trump’s campaign.” (The story would say the conversations were based on “phone records and intercepted calls” and involved “senior Russian intelligence officials.” ) He asks Baquet, “Are we feeding right into a conspiracy” with the “recurring themes of contacts?”
Baquet responded that he wanted the story, up high, to “show the range” and level of “contacts” and “meetings, a few of which could also be completely innocent” and never “sinister,” followed by a “nut” or summary “graph,” explaining why “that is something that continues to hobble them.”
Baquet’s desire to flush out the main points of supposed contacts is comparable to his well-founded skepticism in October 2016 in regards to the supposed computer links between a Russian bank and the Trump organization.
Mazzetti reports back that the story is “nailed down.”
Baquet asks, “Are you able to pull it off?”
“Oh yeah,” Mazzetti replies.
So Baquet signs off, adding that it’s the “biggest story in years.”
Elisabeth Bumiller, the Washington bureau chief, adds her seal of approval: “There’ll be hair on fire.”
As for the particular details Baquet asked to be included within the story, the reporters simply wrote that their sources “wouldn’t disclose many details.” The piece did contain a disclaimer up high, noting that their sources, “to this point,” had seen “no evidence” of the Trump campaign colluding with the Russians.
But in the subsequent paragraph it reported anonymous officials being “alarmed” in regards to the supposed Russian-Trump contacts because they occurred while Trump made his comments in Florida in July 2016 wondering whether Russia could find Hillary’s missing emails.
The story said “the FBI declined to comment.” In reality, the FBI was quickly ripping the piece to shreds, in a series of annotated comments by Strzok, who managed the Russia case. His evaluation, prepared for his bosses, found quite a few inaccuracies, including a categorical refutation of the lead and headline; “we’re unaware,” Strzok wrote, “of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” Comey immediately checked with other intelligence agencies to see in the event that they had any such evidence, got here up empty, and relayed his findings to a closed Senate briefing, based on testimony at a Senate hearing months later.
Within the article’s discussion of the dossier, it described Steele as having “a reputable track record” and noted the FBI had recently contacted “some” of Steele’s “sources.” Actually, the FBI had recently interviewed Steele’s “primary” source, a Russian working at a Washington think tank, who told them Steele’s reporting was “misstated or exaggerated” and the Russian’s own information was based on “rumor and speculation,” based on notes of the interview released later. The day the Times piece appeared in print, Strzok emailed colleagues and reported that Steele “is probably not ready to guage the reliability” of his network of sources, based on Justice Department documents released in 2020.
CNN quickly followed the Times story with a more modest account, noting Trump advisers had been in “constant communication throughout the campaign with Russians known to US intelligence.” The White House, just a few days later, told reporters that the 2 top FBI officials, Comey and McCabe, had privately told the White House that the Times story was inaccurate, with McCabe calling it “bullshit.” This was consistent with Strzok’s evaluation, however the FBI, following custom, stayed silent, based on the pool report for White House correspondents and a former government official. The White House had told the FBI it was getting “crushed” on the Times story, based on the pool report, which most media outlets ignored.
Strzok, in an interview, said his evaluation was done for senior FBI leadership, including “Comey, Andy, and Bill” Priestap, his supervisor, “to say there have been problems there.” I emailed Comey’s lawyer and an in depth associate searching for an interview. Comey never responded.
Trump allies put out an analogous message in regards to the Times piece. Devin Nunes, then the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, repeatedly reached out to reporters to try to knock it down, noting his investigation, which included access to FBI and other intelligence material, had seen no such evidence as cited by the Times. But reporters were skeptical. One asked Nunes if he was working with the White House in “some form of coordinated effort to keep off,” based on a transcript.
Nunes, at one briefing within the wake of the Times piece, appeared to toss within the towel: “I can’t control what you guys write,” the transcript shows. It wasn’t until June, after there was a public rebuke of the story by Comey, that news outlets saw fit to query its reliability.
The Times piece “was the height of the frenzy” over Trump and Russia, Cullison, the Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the difficulty, told me. “It’s form of just like the Watergate burglary,” Woodward said, since it helped “launch the difficulty.” The day after the story appeared in print, Trump held a press briefing where he called the Times story “a joke” and “fake news.”
He was asked whether his use of “fake news” wasn’t “undermining confidence in our news media.”
“No, no,” he replied, he just wanted a more “honest” press. “The general public doesn’t imagine you people anymore,” and “now, perhaps I had something to do with that.”
After his contentious, seventy-seven-minute press briefing within the wake of the Times story in February 2017, Trump left for Florida, believing that the Times story was “the ultimate nail within the coffin,” based on an aide who went with him.
Soon after his plane landed, he turned to Twitter and called the “FAKE NEWS media” the “enemy of the American people,” citing several news organizations, including the Times and CNN.
The phrase was coined greater than a decade ago by Pat Caddell, a Democratic pollster going back to the Nineteen Seventies. Caddell, who died in 2019, became disillusioned with the party, and have become an analyst on Fox News. He explained to The Latest Yorker in 2017 why he wound up in Trump’s orbit:
“People said he was only a clown,” he told the author Jane Mayer, “but I’ve learned that it’s best to at all times listen to successful ‘clowns.’” Mayer reported that Trump met with Caddell in South Carolina, on his approach to Florida, and hours before the “enemies” tweet. It was just a few days before the 2016 election when Caddell, appearing on a now defunct conservative podcast, Media Madness, said the media was on a “political jihad against Trump” and “they’re making themselves the enemies of the American people.”
It went unnoticed. But once Trump adopted, and turbocharged, Caddell’s slogan, the war between the president and the media had been officially declared and probabilities of a truce were slim.
Marty Baron, the chief editor of the Post on the time, thought then that going forward, Trump “would vilify” the press, “actually dehumanize us,” he told the newspaper in 2021 upon his retirement. Just after the 2017 tweet, Baron offered a robust response from the press, regardless that Trump had not included the Post in his list of enemies: speaking at a conference, he said, “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.”
The Times had its own tackle the tweet’s “escalating rhetoric” and Trump’s relationship with the Washington press corps. A story published one week later, coauthored by the paper’s White House correspondent, explained how Trump “has stumbled into probably the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the everlasting government.”
That echoes how NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, described the leak of the dossier on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, hours after it was posted in January. The “intelligence community,” Engel’s “senior intelligence source” had told him, had decided to “drop” the dossier “like a bomb” on Trump because they were “offended” and desired to “put him on notice” that they needed answers to the Russia-related questions swirling around him.
For Trump and his allies, Engel’s remarks and the Times account describe what they saw as a “Deep State” out to get the president. In the times after Trump’s declaration, the Times surveyed its latest digital subscribers, hundreds of thousands of whom flocked to the paper during his presidency, to raised understand their motivations: the administration’s “vilification of the press,” one subscriber replied, in a typical response, based on “Latest Digital Subscribers Survey” data provided to me by a Times staffer.
Trump would often call the Times “failing,” including the day after the controversial story about Russia-Trump ties, but in reality the soaring digital-subscriber base throughout his presidency offset the regular fall in revenue from print subscribers and promoting.
On March 1, 2017, the Times stood by the accuracy of its explosive story about Trump’s Russia connections but tried some clarification. Whereas the primary story cited 4 anonymous sources, now the Times had found “greater than a half dozen officials” said to have “confirmed contacts of varied kinds.” Then, nevertheless, the story muddied the unique query of whether Trump associates had contacted “senior Russian intelligence officials” by noting that “the label ‘intelligence official’ just isn’t at all times cleanly applied in Russia.”
FBI officials thought the story was a multitude. Messages later made public from that day indicated the bureau thought the Times would attempt to “correct” its mistakes from just a few weeks earlier and “save their repute.” But, as Strzok saw it, the paper was “doubling down on the inaccuracies.”
Strzok met with reporters from the paper the subsequent day, based on FBI records. After I asked him about his dealings with them he said that “anytime I talked to the media it was on the direction of and with the participation of members of the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs.”
Baquet’s original concerns in mid-February, about distinguishing between “innocent” and “sinister” contacts, weren’t addressed within the March 1 story. Then, two days later, one other Times story—“Trump Team’s Links to Russia”—addressed the issue, while referencing the disputed February story. The article noted it might have been “absurd and contrary to American interests” to avoid meetings with Russians before or after the campaign and that the repeated Trump-related contacts involved “courtesy calls, policy discussions, and business contacts” and “nothing has emerged publicly indicating anything more sinister.” One among the writers interviewed Konstantin Kilimnik, the previous Ukrainian business partner of Manafort’s, who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign for just a few months and whose name appeared within the February story about Trump aides overheard talking to senior Russian intelligence officials.
Kilimnik was described within the article as having been under investigation in Ukraine in 2016 “on suspicion of ties to Russian spy agencies,” but, the article said, no charges were brought. Kilimnik, born in Russia, told the Times that he had never been questioned. If he did have any such ties, “they might arrest me.” Kilimnik, in an email to me, said his interaction then with the Times arose because two Times reporters joined a “background talk” at a “dinner with a friend.” As was often the case, the news cycle shifted inside hours. Early on a Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that his predecessor, Barack Obama, “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” before the election. The claim was quickly denied by spokespersons for Obama and the federal government, and a latest line of attack against Trump was opened.
Trump says he based his tweet on something he saw on Fox News that morning. “I used to be watching Bret Baier Saturday morning,” he said in an interview, referring to an episode that ran the night before, “and he had used the words spying on my campaign.” Trump thought the tweet “was innocuous” until an aide told him, “Sir, the lines are lit up.”
A transcript of Baier’s show, Special Report, has him talking a few “wiretap at Trump Tower with some computer and Russian banks,” adding that “the Obama administration was pretty aggressive with a few FISAs.”
Most media went big on the wiretapping flap. The subsequent day, James Clapper, the previous Director of National Intelligence under Obama, went on Meet the Press to say “there was no such wiretap activity.” He also said that in his time in office, which ended January 20, “we had no evidence of such collusion,” speaking of Trump’s campaign and Russia.
The Post put the collusion denial at the top of its story, while the Times ignored it.
On March 20, Comey appeared before the House Intelligence Committee and gave official blessing to the collusion narrative running rampant within the media. He testified that the FBI was “investigating the character of any links between individuals related to the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
Before Comey’s testimony, Adam Schiff, the rating Democrat, read a gap statement during which he quoted from the dossier’s unsubstantiated allegation about Carter Page meeting with a sanctioned Russian official near Putin in 2016 to debate a very lucrative business deal in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. The California Democrat would go on MSNBC two days later to state that there was “greater than circumstantial evidence now” of collusion. He offered no substantiation. Schiff declined to comment through his press aide, Lauren French, who said, in an email, “this isn’t something we’re going to maneuver forward on.”
The Post did a serious story every week later that appeared to burnish the dossier’s important conspiracy allegation.
It didn’t delay. Two weeks after that the Post followed with the disclosure of the Carter Page FISA surveillance, a story that turned out to have significant omissions.
The Post landed a protracted story about Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman, on March 29. The highest of the piece identified Millian because the source behind the dossier’s most serious allegation, a “well-developed conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, the identical ground covered by the Wall Street Journal and ABC in January. The claim that Millian was a key informant whose information was “central to the dossier” was stated with none attribution or sourcing. In 2021 the Post retracted the parts of the story describing Millian as a dossier source after John Durham, a special counsel looking into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigations, indicted Steele’s important source for lying to the FBI. Durham alleged the actual fact of Millian being a source had been “fabricated.” The Post editor’s note explained that Durham’s indictment “contradicted” information within the March story, and extra reporting in 2021 further “undermined” the account. The Post also deleted parts of just a few other stories that repeated the allegation that Millian was a dossier source.
After the retractions, the Post editor who replaced Baron, Sally Buzbee, said to the Times that the paper had been “very skeptical in regards to the contents of the dossier.” Some Post reporters—though not the authors of the piece—had called the contents “garbage” and “bullshit.” Buzbee and other Post journalists declined my requests for an interview. A Post spokesperson said that the piece was a part of an effort “to scrutinize the origins of the dossier” and that the paper had “made it clear how hard it was to confirm the dossier.”
In early April, the Post story on Page landed, calling the surveillance “the clearest evidence to this point that the FBI had reason to imagine throughout the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in contact with Russian agents. Such contacts are actually at the middle of an investigation into whether the campaign coordinated with the Russian government to swing the election in Trump’s favor.” It noted Page’s “effusive praise” for Putin and mentioned Schiff’s congressional recitation of the Page allegations within the dossier. Counting on anonymous sources, it gave a vague update on the dossier’s credibility: “a number of the information within the dossier had been verified by US intelligence agencies, and a few of it hasn’t.”
On the Times, the newsroom was irked about getting beaten by the Post. “Times is offended with us in regards to the WP scoop,” Strzok texted to an FBI colleague, just a few days later.
However the Post scoop was incomplete. Its anonymous sources mirrored the FBI’s suspicions but not noted the bureau’s missteps and exculpatory evidence, as subsequent investigations revealed. It seems that the key surveillance of Page was an effort to herald heavier artillery to an FBI inquiry that, in the autumn of 2016, wasn’t finding any nefarious links, because the Times reported back then. Agents were capable of review “emails between Page and members of the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign concerning campaign related matters,” based on an inquiry in 2019 by the Justice Department Inspector General. FBI documents show the surveillance of Page targeted 4 facilities, two email, one cell, and one Skype.
Still, even with the added surveillance capability, the investigation had not turned up evidence for any possible charges by the date of the Post piece, which got here 4 days after the key surveillance, called FISA, for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was renewed for the second time. (Page was never charged.)
The IG review also found that the FISA warrant process was deeply flawed. It relied heavily on the dossier, including the fabricated Millian allegation of a conspiracy, the IG found. Moreover, the report said the warrants contained seventeen “significant errors and omissions,” akin to leaving out exculpatory details about Page, including his previous work for the CIA and comments he made to an undercover FBI informant. And by the point of the Post piece, the dossier’s credibility was collapsing; the FBI knew the CIA called it “web rumor,” and by itself the FBI “didn’t find corroboration for Steele’s election reporting,” based on the IG report.
The Post spokesperson, who would only speak on background, said the article on Page was “fair and accurate” and meant to reflect “how deeply the FBI’s suspicions were about Page.” They acknowledged the story was incomplete, noting that “at the moment there was quite a bit that was not publicly known.”
Trump, by the spring of 2017, was greater than uneasy with Comey. In one among his chats, he told the director his policies were “bad” for Russia because he wanted “more oil and more nukes” and the FBI inquiry was making a “cloud” over his dealings with foreign leaders, based on Comey’s notes.
Finally, he had enough. Trump met with senior officials, and his deputy counsel told him that firing Comey would delay, not curb, the FBI investigation and possibly end in the appointment of a special counsel, based on lawyers briefed on the meeting.
“The president acknowledged” the dire prognosis within the meeting, based on William Barr, who, as attorney general in 2019, oversaw the top of the Mueller inquiry. However the president didn’t care, declaring, based on Barr: “I’m still going to fireside the son of a bitch.”
He did just that.
A note on disclosure
In 2015–16, I used to be a senior reporter at ProPublica. There, I reported on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Russian oligarchs, amongst other subjects. I helped ProPublica resolve whether to collaborate with a book that was critical of the Clintons’ involvement with Russia; the arrangement didn’t occur. One other of the projects I worked on, also involving Clinton, was published within the Washington Post in 2016, where I shared a byline. A few of my other Clinton-related work was utilized in 2016 articles appearing within the Latest York Times, my employer between 1976 and 2005, but without my byline. Initially, the Times sought my assistance on a story about Hillary’s handling of Bill Clinton’s infidelity. Subsequently I approached the paper by myself in regards to the Clinton family foundation. In each cases, I interacted with reporters and editors but was not involved within the writing or editing of the stories that used my reporting. Through the second interaction, I expressed disappointment to one among the Times reporters in regards to the outcome.
I left ProPublica in December 2016. That month I used to be approached by one among the cofounders of Fusion GPS, who sounded me out about joining a Trump-related project the firm was contemplating. The discussion didn’t result in any collaboration. I had previously interacted with Fusion related to my reporting on Russian oligarchs.
Within the 2017–18 academic 12 months I used to be a nonresident fellow on the Investigative Reporting Program, affiliated with the Graduate School of Journalism on the University of California, Berkeley. There, one among my projects involved looking into the dossier as a part of preliminary research for a 2020 film the Investigative Reporting Program helped produce for HBO on Russian meddling. I used to be not on the film’s credits.
At CJR, these stories have been edited by Kyle Pope, its editor and publisher. Kyle’s wife, Kate Kelly, is a reporter for the Washington bureau of the Latest York Times. CJR’s former board chair was Steve Adler, formerly the editor in chief of Reuters; its current board chair is Rebecca Blumenstein, a former deputy managing editor of the Times who recently became president of editorial for NBC News.
Jeff Gerth is a contract journalist who spent three a long time as an investigative reporter on the Latest York Times.
TOP IMAGE: Former President Donald Trump walks on stage during an event Friday, July 8, 2022, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)